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Rethinking border walls as fluid meshworks

journal contribution
posted on 2023-10-23, 23:43 authored by Umut Ozguc
We tend to see border walls as stable concrete fortifications. This article seeks to offer an alternative understanding of walls by suggesting a shift in border studies from network thinking to meshwork thinking. Despite references to multiplicity, concepts of networks and assemblages in border studies continue to provide neat narratives of walls. This article reimagines the border beyond sovereign–disciplinary–biopolitical networks and assemblages. It argues that border walls are constituted by and constitutive of the ever-shifting transformative movements of lines: colonizing lines, crack lines and lines of flight. By tracing the lines of the Separation Wall in the West Bank, this article reveals that, on the border, all these lines coexist, entangle with one another, and in their entanglements, they alter each other to form a fluid meshwork. Meshwork thinking shows the constant mobility of the border and shifts our attention to the power of molecular movements beneath the state in creating, sustaining and disrupting power politics. By presenting a less state-centric, more complex picture of the Separation Wall, this article aims to highlight the movement of the lines that transform the border into a meshwork.

History

Journal

Security Dialogue

Volume

52

Pagination

287 - 305

Location

Thousand Oaks, CA

ISSN

0967-0106

eISSN

1460-3640

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2020, The Author

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